Verizon FiOS – and Other Fairy Tales

August 22, 2005

So, a little over a month has gone by since one of the Verizon FiOS Pre-Sales reps sold me the Brooklyn Bridgesigned me up for FiOS service, and a week has gone by since the latest date I was supposed to hear from the installer by (8/15).

Now to paraphrase Penn & Teller, this isn’t my first time to a goat f**k, (I was a Verizon / GTE customer for a couple of decades), so I poured myself a big cup of coffee and settled in for a little quality phone time with the good folks at Verizon customer service.

First, I dialed the number I was told was the “Main FiOS number” — naturally enough, it wasn’t a FiOS number; it was the number for (apparently) Verizon long distance service in New York (I’m in Texas).

After a handful of repeated explanations, I eventually got transfered to what appeared to be the right group for FiOS service in the D/FW area.

They couldn’t find my order (the pre-sales guy never gave me an order number), and then proceeded to tell me that service wasn’t available at my address.

Interesting. The pre-sales guy had been convinced that I qualified, so I tried to nail down for certain whether my address qualified and the service just hadn’t been turned up yet in my section, or whether I wasn’t even really on the “eligable to sign up” list, but the customer support rep either couldn’t or wouldn’t make the distinction.

The rep did promise to check my address each and every morning and give me a call back as soon as it qualified, and I tried very hard to keep the laughter out of my voice when I heard that, and thanked her.

So, no FiOS for me. At least not today, who knows about tomorrow? The installer may call out of the blue, or I may never get qualfied.

In the meantime, I’ll call them every couple of months when I’m in need of a laugh.

I’d almost forgotten just how much fun it is to be a Verizon customer.

Entertainingly, the This Week in Tech (aka “TWiT”) podcast today was also dissing the amount of real installations of FiOS vs. the hype.

(BTW — If you haven’t heard the TWiT podcasts, and happen to be an old Tech TV “Screen Savers” fan, you need to go subscribe; it’s almost an audio verison of “Best of the Screen Savers”, complete with Leo, Patrick and some other entertaining folk)